In Other Rooms, Other Wonders Read online

  The mother fell onto the body, quietly saying, ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  Jaglani went outside. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘A cobra came through the window, the water must have filled its hole. The boy’s hand hung over the edge of the charpoy, and the snake brushed the hand.’

  ‘Did they kill the snake?’

  A man went inside and brought out the cobra, black, three feet long, dangling like a hose over the stick with which he carried it. It slid off into the mud, making a soft slapping sound.

  Back in his house, Jaglani found that he couldn’t sleep, that he wanted something, tea or some food. He hadn’t known the boy, though he had seen him about. The father had worked on the farm for twenty years, since childhood. Now he was a heavy-featured man with a few days’ muzzle of graying beard, his teeth almost gone, rather stupid, so that the other men made good-humored jokes about him.

  Jaglani pushed the bell button, which rang out in the dera where the watchman could hear it.

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ he told the watchman. ‘Call Zainab and tell her to make me some tea. I’ve got a fever.’

  ‘Shall I send Mustafa for medicine?’

  ‘No, in the morning I’ll go back to Firoza. Just tea.’

  Zainab came into the room, walking quietly as always. ‘I’m sorry you’re not well.’

  ‘Come here,’ said Jaglani. He took her by the wrist and pulled her down onto the bed. She didn’t resist, but instead, with a single motion removed her kurta, pulling it over her head. As she came onto the bed she kicked off her shoes.

  Rolling on top of her, he searched her face.

  ‘I need you to be here in the house whenever I’m here.’ He looked directly into her eyes.

  ‘I told you, I won’t. I’ll go away.’

  ‘Where can you go?’

  ‘My husband has written three times. He says he’ll take me back. I’ll go there.’

  Jaglani lay staring at the ceiling, his emotions tightened up almost unbearably.

  ‘I’ll marry you,’ he said.

  ‘What about my husband?’

  ‘I’ll arrange it.’

  She turned and began kissing him, looking down on his face. He closed his eyes.

  Jaglani knew that his wife, who was also his first cousin, would try to turn their common family against him if he took another wife. In the next few days he didn’t mention his offer of marriage again, although it lay between them. Zainab became harder and more emotionally inflexible than before. She did what he asked. Again and always in bed, sexually, she opened and became almost vicious, pliable, biting him, on his cheeks, his neck; but after they finished she withdrew into herself. Only sometimes, when they lay in bed, she would cough or feel cold and he would offer to do something for her, to bring water or to find a blanket, and she would say, ‘Yes, please,’ in a girlish voice that wrung his heart. Finally he could not deny to himself that he had fallen in love, for the first time in his life. He even acknowledged her aloof coldness, the possibility that she would mar his life. And yet he felt that he had risen so far, had become invulnerable to the judgments of those around him, had become preeminent in this area by the Indus River, and now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice, but to surrender to his desire.

  In the beginning of September, after the monsoon, the immense Punjabi heat began to subside. One morning when Zainab brought his breakfast he said to her, ‘Your husband comes today.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve called him. He needs to sign the divorce papers.’

  ‘He won’t do that.’

  Jaglani looked up at her as she leaned forward placing the tray of food on the table in front of him. ‘You still don’t know me, do you?’

  In the late afternoon Zainab’s husband, a peasant named Aslam born in Dunyapur, entered the dera, a small figure advancing through the whitewashed brick gates, having walked from the main road, where the intercity bus dropped him off.

  Jaglani sat under the banyan tree, signing cash vouchers passed to him by an aged accountant wearing spectacles mended with wire.

  Aslam approached, said his salaam, and touched Jaglani’s knee.

  ‘Hello Aslam,’ said Jaglani. ‘I’ll call you, go sit.’

  Seven or eight men sat in chairs under a verandah, all waiting to see Jaglani, with petitions of various kinds – a stolen ox, water issues, begging for jobs, needing letters to local government administrators.

  Jaglani saw Aslam last of all, several hours later. The sky had darkened, and the maulvi in the plain but large marbled mosque built by the Harounis had finished the maghreb call for prayer, standing on a platform, his voice reedy.

  ‘Aslam, you can’t seem to control your wife,’ began Jaglani, without any preamble.

  ‘No sir. She ran back to the village. I’m here, and I intend to take her home.’

  ‘I’m told she doesn’t want to go. You’d better divorce her.’

  ‘Sir, no. My house is empty, every night I come home and it’s empty.’

  ‘Why don’t you have children?’ asked Jaglani. ‘Didn’t you live with her as her husband?’

  ‘In the beginning we tried. We had no luck.’

  ‘That’s grounds for divorce. I suggest you divorce her for being barren.’

  ‘Please, Chaudrey Sahib, you and I grew up together in Dunyapur, we played together as children. I beg you, don’t take what’s mine. You have so much, and I so little.’

  ‘I have so much because I took what I wanted. Go away.’

  The husband said, ‘Take her and be damned with her,’ but Jaglani ignored him.

  The next morning one of the farm accountants presented Aslam with some papers. Knowing the husband to be illiterate, and wishing to spare him further humiliation, the accountant assured him that the papers simply gave Zainab permission to live apart. Aslam left Dunyapur with a letter to the manager of the bank where he worked in Rawalpindi. In the letter Jaglani requested that the manager, a dependent of the Harounis, give Aslam a raise and watch over him.

  A few weeks later Jaglani secretly married Zainab. The maulvi from the mosque came quietly into Chaudrey Sahib’s house one morning, bringing with him one of the old managers to act as a witness. The villagers bullied the maulvi, a timid man with a scrawny beard. He blushed when he spoke, and would ask the cook in the dera for little treats from the common pot to take home for his wife, as his pay barely covered their thin monthly expenditure. The manager, by contrast, cuffed his men about and had a voice like a baying hound. Coming across the courtyard of the dera, under the blowing trees, the maulvi turned to the manager.

  ‘Won’t Jaglani’s sons blame us for this?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’said the manager, ‘there’s not enough blood in their livers to clog the foot of a flea. Even when the big man dies they’ll be afraid to cross him. And she can take care of herself, she’s like a hatchet.’

  When they entered the courtyard of the little house they found Jaglani sitting on a charpoy smoking his hookah. The two men sat down, and while the maulvi watched, Jaglani and the manager spoke of the September cane sowing, just completed, and of the cotton just then developing bolls. The manager picked at a callus on his foot. After a few minutes the register of deeds, a man who owed his posting in the area to Jaglani, and who had collaborated in numerous dubious land transfers, entered with the marriage papers in a big ledger under his arm. He took from his pocket a gold pen worth several months of his official salary and began filling out the forms, writing in an elegant hand, and with a look of satisfaction on his face. He loved these forms, loved consummating rich transactions. Jaglani signed, the single witness signed, and then the maulvi rose and said a prayer, his hands cupped, speaking rapidly and with perfect memory. The other three required witnesses would sign later, if the need arose – the register of deeds had urged that they leave the document incomplete to this degree. Under the trees and with the birds calling, Jaglani felt extremely
moved, felt his emotions to be like clear glass. He took the papers inside and Zainab affixed her thumbprint, leaning against him as they sat on the bed, her face soft. When he had insisted upon keeping the marriage secret she made only one stipulation – that they no longer would use birth control.

  Zainab now slept the night in Jaglani’s bed. She brought many of her things, clothes and jewelry, her makeup, and put them about the house. Seeing these little tokens of her presence made him happy, made him feel that he possessed her. She asked him to buy a buffalo, and twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, the villager who cared for the animal would bring a pail of the rich milk and leave it just inside the courtyard, covered with a cloth. She made ghee and butter, and if some was left over she sent it to Mustafa’s house, or to the house of one of the poorer neighbors who couldn’t afford to keep a buffalo. Only in the mornings, when Jaglani wanted to hold her, to lie in bed with her and talk quietly, or perhaps to make love, she still would not stay with him, but became restless and would get up, saying that she needed to begin the day. Although she did not like being touched, except when in bed, he found that now she tried to accept his caresses, tried not to be cold to him. When he came into the house and approached her from behind as she stood doing some household task, cupping her breasts in his hands, she became still and turned her head, smiling, and only after a moment would she disengage from him. Even then she would hold his hand and lead him outside, seating him on the charpoy and bringing his hookah. He became familiar with the smallest aspects of her body. She cut her toenails one day, but cut too far, into the quick, an inverted half-moon, until one of the nails bled. He loved this wildness in her, evidence of hardness toward herself, contained violence.

  She developed a urinary infection, and he took her into town. She rode in the back of his jeep, and as always her brother Mustafa drove. None of them spoke. She kept her head covered, and didn’t look out of the window. Even this trip, their first together, became for him a significant memory. He wanted to take care of her, but often she would not allow him to. When he returned to Dunyapur after spending a few days in Firoza with his senior wife, as he drove toward the river he would feel a weight on his stomach. He feared Zainab, strangely enough, although he had made a career of fearing no one and of thereby dominating this lawless area. Sometimes he thought that it would be a relief to be rid of her, and yet his love kept increasing.

  He became slightly complacent, finding her softer than he had imagined. After they made love she would lie next to him in the dark, tracing her fingers on his back and leaning down to kiss him. Before the marriage he always had been the one to caress her, while she lay with her back to him, curled into his body, her eyes open, rigid and seemingly resentful of having opened herself, not only physically but also emotionally, at least in the moments of sex.

  She had blamed her husband for her failure to conceive. A year after her second marriage Jaglani arrived at dusk from Firoza. Mustafa drove the jeep into the dera, the headlights illuminating the banyan, the tractors standing in a row along the wall, plows and harrows and disks here and there. The watchman stood up, leaning on his long stick, and shielded his eyes with one hand. Another summer had passed, another monsoon. The jasmine planted along the high mud walls that enclosed the dera gave off its strong sweet smell. Jaglani liked flowers, and he also believed that the farm ran best when the roads were kept immaculate and smooth and the buildings whitewashed and adorned with flowers and trees. Order begat order.

  Walking into the house, he found the fire out and the light off, although he had sent word in the morning that he would be returning to the farm. Inside Zainab sat in the dark on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Why no lights?’ he asked, flipping the switch.

  She had not dressed up, but wore wrinkled clothes.

  ‘Do you know what day this is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The day we married, last year.’ She paused. ‘You know, I thought I didn’t have children with Aslam because he couldn’t. But it’s me.’ She almost began to cry, but then stopped herself. Her face became hard. ‘I only married you because of that.’

  Cut badly, he said, ‘You had no choice. How long would your sister-in-law have treated you well? You came like a beggar.’

  ‘I never begged, but now I’ll beg from you. I’ll bow down. I beg you, give me one of your sons’ children to bring up. Shabir has three daughters. The little one, give me her. He has his sons, he’ll still have them and the other girls. The little one is only a few months old, she won’t even know that I’m not her real mother. Give her to me, I beg you, and I’ll never ask for anything again.’ She began to cry, through her teeth. ‘I beg you, I beg you, I beg you. I’ve served you. I belong to you, you know I do. Give me the little girl. Shabir doesn’t even want her, you know he doesn’t.’

  He refused. ‘I can’t, my family doesn’t know we’re married.’

  That winter Jaglani decided to run for office, for the Provincial Assembly. The local powers, the people above him, the Makhdooms, hereditary saints who controlled huge areas of land nearby and who could hand out Muslim League tickets, sent people to Jaglani and offered to help get him elected. He went to Lahore and received the blessing of K. K. Harouni. As a preliminary to the election, in order to prevent his opponent from using it against him, Jaglani disclosed the secret of his marriage to Zainab. He gave his wife and children no opportunity to respond – he announced it to them. The villagers had already guessed, but now had it confirmed. Others found out.

  No one thought anything of it, he ruled his area in the old way, with force. He had the prerogative of taking a second wife, a chosen wife. Flushed with his power, Jaglani went further. He brought his son’s infant daughter to Dunyapur and gave her to Zainab, to nurse and to bring up.

  Another year passed. Jaglani had been elected to the Provincial Assembly by a wide margin, and thus spent his time either in Lahore attending sessions or at the farm, hearing the petitions and complaints of his constituents, the people from the area. His district ran along both sides of the Indus River, and the people on the far side came across on a wooden ferry, flat-bottomed and large enough to hold twenty people, pushed along on long sweeps by an old man, whose body had remained muscular, but whose skin hung off him wherever the muscles didn’t extend.

  One of Jaglani’s first acts on entering office had been to move it from another spot five miles downstream to a little bay on the river immediately next to Dunyapur, over the protests of those who found the original situation more convenient. The ferry had served the village of the man who stood against Jaglani in the election, and by moving the ferry he showed the entire district his new powers. He had new bricked roads built to meet the ferry at each bank of the river, and these roads greatly increased the value of Jaglani’s lands and the lands of his friends. Jaglani could order men arrested or released, could appoint them to government posts, could have government officers removed. He decided whose villages the new roads passed through, decided which areas got electricity, manipulated the flow of water through the canals. He could settle cases, even cases of murder, by imposing a reconciliation upon the two parties and ordering the police not to interfere. These new powers changed him. Because he had no higher ambitions, he became impartial. By temperament orderly, within this isolated area he sought to impose harmony and prosperity.

  Coming into the house one afternoon, Jaglani did not find Zainab in the little kitchen preparing his food. He called.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In my room,’ she replied, speaking in her gentle voice, which he liked so much. ‘Come in, come see.’

  Jaglani walked through the room he shared with her and into her own quarters. Unlike the rest of the house, which was dark and crowded with furniture, Zainab’s room had only a small low bed, padded with cotton, a chair, and a plain wooden table, on which she had arranged her makeup and combs, with a mirror in front of it, and in one corner a crib. A small cotton dhurrie covered the center of the brick f
loor. The high windows stood open, drawing light into the room, reflecting off the freshly whitewashed walls. The baby stood on the bed, waving her fat little arms, naked, her feet planted between Zainab’s crossed legs. Zainab leaned against a pillow and, dipping a cloth into a bowl of warm water, gently washed the baby. The light from the windows reflected off the disturbed water in the brass bowl, throwing a pattern onto the walls.

  ‘Watch,’ said Zainab. She tickled the baby, whom she had renamed Saba, under the chin, holding her around the waist. He noticed the strength of Zainab’s slender arm, on which the veins stood out, and he noticed the sureness with which his wife held this baby. The baby giggled. Zainab laid her on the bed and bent over her.

  ‘Say it,’ she whispered soothingly. Her pale manicured feet peeked out under her thighs, the soles reddened with henna. ‘Say it, little bunny, my little Saba.’

  The baby looked up at her, smiling, coral gums wet with spittle. She waved her chubby arms, fingers splayed. ‘Ma,’ she said.

  ‘See?’ said Zainab, turning to Jaglani, who sat on the little chair next to the table. Zainab had been worrying because the baby, nearly two years old, had not yet begun to speak. Vulnerable, he watched the baby intently, smiling a shy smile, his features becoming gentle, the face of a sad boy, knowing and needy. ‘If only the managers could see this smile,’ she would say.

  Zainab gestured. ‘Come, bring your chair over by us.’